Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [48]
Fitz was forced to keep his distance in order to remain unseen, but he still saw enough of the Professor’s contact to send a good description back to the Doctor. The Professor was meeting with a female, probably below the age of twenty, who wore a black winter cloak despite the mild weather. The woman’s head was largely obscured by the hood of the cloak, which Fitz suspected was designed to hide her hair rather than her face. The cut of the hair seemed unusual, certainly for that period. Fitz had never seen her before, yet described her as ‘sort of oriental… with this smooth-looking skin’. In a word, Polynesian.
The Doctor would have wasted no time in making the connection. The Professor reporting to the Mayakai; the Mayakai reporting to Sabbath; Sabbath working towards… what? Fitz tried to follow the girl, but he had no way of keeping track of her as he did with the Professor, and as a result all he could report was that she vanished along the path by the side of the river.
It was during the following days, while Fitz and Juliette saw the sights in Cambridge and considered their next move, that Fitz slowly developed his new theory. At some point he began to make a connection which nobody else had made, and which even the rat-catchers (with a less impressive knowledge of the historical process than even a minor elemental, one assumes) hadn’t spotted. Leviathan, Fitz must have thought. Sabbath, initiated in the Thames. Sabbath the occult engineer. Juliette’s vision, of metallic, futuristic war machines…
The next few weeks in Cambridge would be a flurry of letter-writing, as Fitz communicated with the Doctor and via the House sent missives of enquiry to all manner of officials, artisans and tradesmen across Britain (Juliette must have helped him, surely). By the end of May, Fitz had learned enough not only to decide that his guess was correct, but actually to make a good guess as to where Sabbath’s current ‘place of power’ might have been.
By then, Scarlette had returned to Henrietta Street from Windsor. She arrived to find that business had dropped radically in her absence, as the Doctor, never one for practicalities, had neglected the housekeeping in favour of his own studies. To her surprise, though, no more of the women had left while she’d been gone. Perhaps they were wary of turning their backs on the elemental and his Indian oracle. No sooner had she stepped through the front door than Scarlette discovered that, with little regard for the cost, all the remaining women of the House had been dressed in new clothes: dresses of black velvet, but decorated with red muslin, the colours of the House turned into something approaching a uniform. Even Anji wore such a dress, though she looked distinctly awkward in it and insisted on adjusting it so as to make it appear less glamorous. Only the Doctor remained in his own colours.
When Scarlette asked the Doctor why he’d done this, and while Lisa-Beth wondered how much the couturier’s bill had come to, the Doctor replied with some enthusiasm that events were moving on apace. Fitz and Juliette had discovered something of importance, he said. The great struggle that had been anticipated ever since the babewyns began to appear was beginning. With that, he cheerily announced that ‘a grand outing’ was planned for the whole House. All the loose ends in London had been sorted out, the Doctor claiming to have worked out who he wanted as best man. For now, though, Scarlette